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  • There are Cloud Heroes Among Us: download the ebook

    - by Javier Puerta
    Given the importance of information systems in today's business world, database administrators (DBAs) and other technology professionals often perform heroic deeds for their organizations. While many of these IT pros are too humble to acknowledge their worth, we profiled five real-world IT heroes to demonstrate their value to their organizations-and the industry at large. Many of our heroes are bloggers who share new ideas and developments with their colleagues. Our heroes are creative individuals who can accurately assess a situation and rally their colleagues to address pressing issues. These heroes are authors and known Oracle technology user group leaders. Read their stories today and join them in leading a greater future for the IT industry.

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  • Alternatives to Google Sites for a personal web site?

    - by Oleg2718281828
    I'd like to find a hosting solution for my personal, fairly low-traffic, web site. I think Google Sites would suit me perfectly, but I've heard horror stories about Google's algorithms shutting down all your accounts on a whim, with no right of appeal, so I'm naturally worried, because I don't want to lose my Gmail. Edit I'm talking about cases like this one: I tried contacting somebody at Google support ("Surely they should have a support department, right?" Nope, wrong!) (The victim managed to regain access to his Gmail account when his case went "viral", but he never got an explanation as to why he had been locked out in the first place) Are there good, preferably free, alternatives to Google Sites and what are their PROs and CONs? One requirement is that I should be able to point the DNS (foobar.com) to it.

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  • How to start working in a team on a project? [closed]

    - by Adio
    Ok, for the first time in my life I am going to work in a team. The problem is that all the team members including me are junior developers and for all of us this is the first time we are working in a team. The problem is that we do not know how to start the project. We know a little about scrum and agile development, we have our user stories in place and our created project - which does not have even one piece of code - and now we are stuck and don't know how and what to do? All scrum books talk about scrum development but lack of the details like how to start. How my team will know what object I am using? How we will push the first piece of code and what it will be? Any help will be great. Books, articles, advice, or anything.

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  • How to avoid problems when installing Ubuntu and Windows 7 in dual-boot?

    - by BlaXpirit
    I want to try out Ubuntu (and hopefully choose it as my primary OS). After looking at many versions of it in VirtualBox and from Live CD, I've finally decided to install it. So I defragmented and shrinked one of the partitions to make room for Ubuntu. My current setup (after shrinking the D: partition): [·100 MB·] [······250000 MB······] [·······600000 MB·······] [··100000 MB···] Reserved Windows 7 system (C:) Data (D:) Free space NTFS NTFS NTFS (for Ubuntu) The Internet (including AskUbuntu) is full of scary stories about Windows not loading after installation of Ubuntu, something about installing GRUB to a wrong partition, etc. As I am a newbie to Linux and Ubuntu, it is very easy for me to do something wrong. Please mention the problems that may appear and explain how to avoid them. Ubuntu version that will be installed: 10.10 Desktop amd64 Please note that I have installed Windows 7 about a year ago, so I have much to lose if something goes wrong. I want to be very careful because there is no way for me to backup all the data.

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  • Windows Azure VMs - New "Stopped" VM Options Provide Cost-effective Flexibility for On-Demand Workloads

    - by KeithMayer
    Originally posted on: http://geekswithblogs.net/KeithMayer/archive/2013/06/22/windows-azure-vms---new-stopped-vm-options-provide-cost-effective.aspxDidn’t make it to TechEd this year? Don’t worry!  This month, we’ll be releasing a new article series that highlights the Best of TechEd announcements and technical information for IT Pros.  Today’s article focuses on a new, much-heralded enhancement to Windows Azure Infrastructure Services to make it more cost-effective for spinning VMs up and down on-demand on the Windows Azure cloud platform. NEW! VMs that are shutdown from the Windows Azure Management Portal will no longer continue to accumulate compute charges while stopped! Previous to this enhancement being available, the Azure platform maintained fabric resource reservations for VMs, even in a shutdown state, to ensure consistent resource availability when starting those VMs in the future.  And, this meant that VMs had to be exported and completely deprovisioned when not in use to avoid compute charges. In this article, I'll provide more details on the scenarios that this enhancement best fits, and I'll also review the new options and considerations that we now have for performing safe shutdowns of Windows Azure VMs. Which scenarios does the new enhancement best fit? Being able to easily shutdown VMs from the Windows Azure Management Portal without continued compute charges is a great enhancement for certain cloud use cases, such as: On-demand dev/test/lab environments - Freely start and stop lab VMs so that they are only accumulating compute charges when being actively used.  "Bursting" load-balanced web applications - Provision a number of load-balanced VMs, but keep the minimum number of VMs running to support "normal" loads. Easily start-up the remaining VMs only when needed to support peak loads. Disaster Recovery - Start-up "cold" VMs when needed to recover from disaster scenarios. BUT ... there is a consideration to keep in mind when using the Windows Azure Management Portal to shutdown VMs: although performing a VM shutdown via the Windows Azure Management Portal causes that VM to no longer accumulate compute charges, it also deallocates the VM from fabric resources to which it was previously assigned.  These fabric resources include compute resources such as virtual CPU cores and memory, as well as network resources, such as IP addresses.  This means that when the VM is later started after being shutdown from the portal, the VM could be assigned a different IP address or placed on a different compute node within the fabric. In some cases, you may want to shutdown VMs using the old approach, where fabric resource assignments are maintained while the VM is in a shutdown state.  Specifically, you may wish to do this when temporarily shutting down or restarting a "7x24" VM as part of a maintenance activity.  Good news - you can still revert back to the old VM shutdown behavior when necessary by using the alternate VM shutdown approaches listed below.  Let's walk through each approach for performing a VM Shutdown action on Windows Azure so that we can understand the benefits and considerations of each... How many ways can I shutdown a VM? In Windows Azure Infrastructure Services, there's three general ways that can be used to safely shutdown VMs: Shutdown VM via Windows Azure Management Portal Shutdown Guest Operating System inside the VM Stop VM via Windows PowerShell using Windows Azure PowerShell Module Although each of these options performs a safe shutdown of the guest operation system and the VM itself, each option handles the VM shutdown end state differently. Shutdown VM via Windows Azure Management Portal When clicking the Shutdown button at the bottom of the Virtual Machines page in the Windows Azure Management Portal, the VM is safely shutdown and "deallocated" from fabric resources.  Shutdown button on Virtual Machines page in Windows Azure Management Portal  When the shutdown process completes, the VM will be shown on the Virtual Machines page with a "Stopped ( Deallocated )" status as shown in the figure below. Virtual Machine in a "Stopped (Deallocated)" Status "Deallocated" means that the VM configuration is no longer being actively associated with fabric resources, such as virtual CPUs, memory and networks. In this state, the VM will not continue to allocate compute charges, but since fabric resources are deallocated, the VM could receive a different internal IP address ( called "Dynamic IPs" or "DIPs" in Windows Azure ) the next time it is started.  TIP: If you are leveraging this shutdown option and consistency of DIPs is important to applications running inside your VMs, you should consider using virtual networks with your VMs.  Virtual networks permit you to assign a specific IP Address Space for use with VMs that are assigned to that virtual network.  As long as you start VMs in the same order in which they were originally provisioned, each VM should be reassigned the same DIP that it was previously using. What about consistency of External IP Addresses? Great question! External IP addresses ( called "Virtual IPs" or "VIPs" in Windows Azure ) are associated with the cloud service in which one or more Windows Azure VMs are running.  As long as at least 1 VM inside a cloud service remains in a "Running" state, the VIP assigned to a cloud service will be preserved.  If all VMs inside a cloud service are in a "Stopped ( Deallocated )" status, then the cloud service may receive a different VIP when VMs are next restarted. TIP: If consistency of VIPs is important for the cloud services in which you are running VMs, consider keeping one VM inside each cloud service in the alternate VM shutdown state listed below to preserve the VIP associated with the cloud service. Shutdown Guest Operating System inside the VM When performing a Guest OS shutdown or restart ( ie., a shutdown or restart operation initiated from the Guest OS running inside the VM ), the VM configuration will not be deallocated from fabric resources. In the figure below, the VM has been shutdown from within the Guest OS and is shown with a "Stopped" VM status rather than the "Stopped ( Deallocated )" VM status that was shown in the previous figure. Note that it may require a few minutes for the Windows Azure Management Portal to reflect that the VM is in a "Stopped" state in this scenario, because we are performing an OS shutdown inside the VM rather than through an Azure management endpoint. Virtual Machine in a "Stopped" Status VMs shown in a "Stopped" status will continue to accumulate compute charges, because fabric resources are still being reserved for these VMs.  However, this also means that DIPs and VIPs are preserved for VMs in this state, so you don't have to worry about VMs and cloud services getting different IP addresses when they are started in the future. Stop VM via Windows PowerShell In the latest version of the Windows Azure PowerShell Module, a new -StayProvisioned parameter has been added to the Stop-AzureVM cmdlet. This new parameter provides the flexibility to choose the VM configuration end result when stopping VMs using PowerShell: When running the Stop-AzureVM cmdlet without the -StayProvisioned parameter specified, the VM will be safely stopped and deallocated; that is, the VM will be left in a "Stopped ( Deallocated )" status just like the end result when a VM Shutdown operation is performed via the Windows Azure Management Portal.  When running the Stop-AzureVM cmdlet with the -StayProvisioned parameter specified, the VM will be safely stopped but fabric resource reservations will be preserved; that is the VM will be left in a "Stopped" status just like the end result when performing a Guest OS shutdown operation. So, with PowerShell, you can choose how Windows Azure should handle VM configuration and fabric resource reservations when stopping VMs on a case-by-case basis. TIP: It's important to note that the -StayProvisioned parameter is only available in the latest version of the Windows Azure PowerShell Module.  So, if you've previously downloaded this module, be sure to download and install the latest version to get this new functionality. Want to Learn More about Windows Azure Infrastructure Services? To learn more about Windows Azure Infrastructure Services, be sure to check-out these additional FREE resources: Become our next "Early Expert"! Complete the Early Experts "Cloud Quest" and build a multi-VM lab network in the cloud for FREE!  Build some cool scenarios! Check out our list of over 20+ Step-by-Step Lab Guides based on key scenarios that IT Pros are implementing on Windows Azure Infrastructure Services TODAY!  Looking forward to seeing you in the Cloud! - Keith Build Your Lab! Download Windows Server 2012 Don’t Have a Lab? Build Your Lab in the Cloud with Windows Azure Virtual Machines Want to Get Certified? Join our Windows Server 2012 "Early Experts" Study Group

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  • Cloud Computing = Elasticity * Availability

    - by Herve Roggero
    What is cloud computing? Is hosting the same thing as cloud computing? Are you running a cloud if you already use virtual machines? What is the difference between Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) and a cloud provider? And the list goes on… these questions keep coming up and all try to fundamentally explain what “cloud” means relative to other concepts. At the risk of over simplification, answering these questions becomes simpler once you understand the primary foundations of cloud computing: Elasticity and Availability.   Elasticity The basic value proposition of cloud computing is to pay as you go, and to pay for what you use. This implies that an application can expand and contract on demand, across all its tiers (presentation layer, services, database, security…).  This also implies that application components can grow independently from each other. So if you need more storage for your database, you should be able to grow that tier without affecting, reconfiguring or changing the other tiers. Basically, cloud applications behave like a sponge; when you add water to a sponge, it grows in size; in the application world, the more customers you add, the more it grows. Pure IaaS providers will provide certain benefits, specifically in terms of operating costs, but an IaaS provider will not help you in making your applications elastic; neither will Virtual Machines. The smallest elasticity unit of an IaaS provider and a Virtual Machine environment is a server (physical or virtual). While adding servers in a datacenter helps in achieving scale, it is hardly enough. The application has yet to use this hardware.  If the process of adding computing resources is not transparent to the application, the application is not elastic.   As you can see from the above description, designing for the cloud is not about more servers; it is about designing an application for elasticity regardless of the underlying server farm.   Availability The fact of the matter is that making applications highly available is hard. It requires highly specialized tools and trained staff. On top of it, it's expensive. Many companies are required to run multiple data centers due to high availability requirements. In some organizations, some data centers are simply on standby, waiting to be used in a case of a failover. Other organizations are able to achieve a certain level of success with active/active data centers, in which all available data centers serve incoming user requests. While achieving high availability for services is relatively simple, establishing a highly available database farm is far more complex. In fact it is so complex that many companies establish yearly tests to validate failover procedures.   To a certain degree certain IaaS provides can assist with complex disaster recovery planning and setting up data centers that can achieve successful failover. However the burden is still on the corporation to manage and maintain such an environment, including regular hardware and software upgrades. Cloud computing on the other hand removes most of the disaster recovery requirements by hiding many of the underlying complexities.   Cloud Providers A cloud provider is an infrastructure provider offering additional tools to achieve application elasticity and availability that are not usually available on-premise. For example Microsoft Azure provides a simple configuration screen that makes it possible to run 1 or 100 web sites by clicking a button or two on a screen (simplifying provisioning), and soon SQL Azure will offer Data Federation to allow database sharding (which allows you to scale the database tier seamlessly and automatically). Other cloud providers offer certain features that are not available on-premise as well, such as the Amazon SC3 (Simple Storage Service) which gives you virtually unlimited storage capabilities for simple data stores, which is somewhat equivalent to the Microsoft Azure Table offering (offering a server-independent data storage model). Unlike IaaS providers, cloud providers give you the necessary tools to adopt elasticity as part of your application architecture.    Some cloud providers offer built-in high availability that get you out of the business of configuring clustered solutions, or running multiple data centers. Some cloud providers will give you more control (which puts some of that burden back on the customers' shoulder) and others will tend to make high availability totally transparent. For example, SQL Azure provides high availability automatically which would be very difficult to achieve (and very costly) on premise.   Keep in mind that each cloud provider has its strengths and weaknesses; some are better at achieving transparent scalability and server independence than others.    Not for Everyone Note however that it is up to you to leverage the elasticity capabilities of a cloud provider, as discussed previously; if you build a website that does not need to scale, for which elasticity is not important, then you can use a traditional host provider unless you also need high availability. Leveraging the technologies of cloud providers can be difficult and can become a journey for companies that build their solutions in a scale up fashion. Cloud computing promises to address cost containment and scalability of applications with built-in high availability. If your application does not need to scale or you do not need high availability, then cloud computing may not be for you. In fact, you may pay a premium to run your applications with cloud providers due to the underlying technologies built specifically for scalability and availability requirements. And as such, the cloud is not for everyone.   Consistent Customer Experience, Predictable Cost With all its complexities, buzz and foggy definition, cloud computing boils down to a simple objective: consistent customer experience at a predictable cost.  The objective of a cloud solution is to provide the same user experience to your last customer than the first, while keeping your operating costs directly proportional to the number of customers you have. Making your applications elastic and highly available across all its tiers, with as much automation as possible, achieves the first objective of a consistent customer experience. And the ability to expand and contract the infrastructure footprint of your application dynamically achieves the cost containment objectives.     Herve Roggero is a SQL Azure MVP and co-author of Pro SQL Azure (APress).  He is the co-founder of Blue Syntax Consulting (www.bluesyntax.net), a company focusing on cloud computing technologies helping customers understand and adopt cloud computing technologies. For more information contact herve at hroggero @ bluesyntax.net .

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  • Source-control 'wet-work'?

    - by Phil Factor
    When a design or creative work is flawed beyond remedy, it is often best to destroy it and start again. The other day, I lost the code to a long and intricate SQL batch I was working on. I’d thought it was impossible, but it happened. With all the technology around that is designed to prevent this occurring, this sort of accident has become a rare event.  If it weren’t for a deranged laptop, and my distraction, the code wouldn’t have been lost this time.  As always, I sighed, had a soothing cup of tea, and typed it all in again.  The new code I hastily tapped in  was much better: I’d held in my head the essence of how the code should work rather than the details: I now knew for certain  the start point, the end, and how it should be achieved. Instantly the detritus of half-baked thoughts fell away and I was able to write logical code that performed better.  Because I could work so quickly, I was able to hold the details of all the columns and variables in my head, and the dynamics of the flow of data. It was, in fact, easier and quicker to start from scratch rather than tidy up and refactor the existing code with its inevitable fumbling and half-baked ideas. What a shame that technology is now so good that developers rarely experience the cleansing shock of losing one’s code and having to rewrite it from scratch.  If you’ve never accidentally lost  your code, then it is worth doing it deliberately once for the experience. Creative people have, until Technology mistakenly prevented it, torn up their drafts or sketches, threw them in the bin, and started again from scratch.  Leonardo’s obsessive reworking of the Mona Lisa was renowned because it was so unusual:  Most artists have been utterly ruthless in destroying work that didn’t quite make it. Authors are particularly keen on writing afresh, and the results are generally positive. Lawrence of Arabia actually lost the entire 250,000 word manuscript of ‘The Seven Pillars of Wisdom’ by accidentally leaving it on a train at Reading station, before rewriting a much better version.  Now, any writer or artist is seduced by technology into altering or refining their work rather than casting it dramatically in the bin or setting a light to it on a bonfire, and rewriting it from the blank page.  It is easy to pick away at a flawed work, but the real creative process is far more brutal. Once, many years ago whilst running a software house that supplied commercial software to local businesses, I’d been supervising an accounting system for a farming cooperative. No packaged system met their needs, and it was all hand-cut code.  For us, it represented a breakthrough as it was for a government organisation, and success would guarantee more contracts. As you’ve probably guessed, the code got mangled in a disk crash just a week before the deadline for delivery, and the many backups all proved to be entirely corrupted by a faulty tape drive.  There were some fragments left on individual machines, but they were all of different versions.  The developers were in despair.  Strangely, I managed to re-write the bulk of a three-month project in a manic and caffeine-soaked weekend.  Sure, that elegant universally-applicable input-form routine was‘nt quite so elegant, but it didn’t really need to be as we knew what forms it needed to support.  Yes, the code lacked architectural elegance and reusability. By dawn on Monday, the application passed its integration tests. The developers rose to the occasion after I’d collapsed, and tidied up what I’d done, though they were reproachful that some of the style and elegance had gone out of the application. By the delivery date, we were able to install it. It was a smaller, faster application than the beta they’d seen and the user-interface had a new, rather Spartan, appearance that we swore was done to conform to the latest in user-interface guidelines. (we switched to Helvetica font to look more ‘Bauhaus’ ). The client was so delighted that he forgave the new bugs that had crept in. I still have the disk that crashed, up in the attic. In IT, we have had mixed experiences from complete re-writes. Lotus 123 never really recovered from a complete rewrite from assembler into C, Borland made the mistake with Arago and Quattro Pro  and Netscape’s complete rewrite of their Navigator 4 browser was a white-knuckle ride. In all cases, the decision to rewrite was a result of extreme circumstances where no other course of action seemed possible.   The rewrite didn’t come out of the blue. I prefer to remember the rewrite of Minix by young Linus Torvalds, or the rewrite of Bitkeeper by a slightly older Linus.  The rewrite of CP/M didn’t do too badly either, did it? Come to think of it, the guy who decided to rewrite the windowing system of the Xerox Star never regretted the decision. I’ll agree that one should often resist calls for a rewrite. One of the worst habits of the more inexperienced programmer is to denigrate whatever code he or she inherits, and then call loudly for a complete rewrite. They are buoyed up by the mistaken belief that they can do better. This, however, is a different psychological phenomenon, more related to the idea of some motorcyclists that they are operating on infinite lives, or the occasional squaddies that if they charge the machine-guns determinedly enough all will be well. Grim experience brings out the humility in any experienced programmer.  I’m referring to quite different circumstances here. Where a team knows the requirements perfectly, are of one mind on methodology and coding standards, and they already have a solution, then what is wrong with considering  a complete rewrite? Rewrites are so painful in the early stages, until that point where one realises the payoff, that even I quail at the thought. One needs a natural disaster to push one over the edge. The trouble is that source-control systems, and disaster recovery systems, are just too good nowadays.   If I were to lose this draft of this very blog post, I know I’d rewrite it much better. However, if you read this, you’ll know I didn’t have the nerve to delete it and start again.  There was a time that one prayed that unreliable hardware would deliver you from an unmaintainable mess of a codebase, but now technology has made us almost entirely immune to such a merciful act of God. An old friend of mine with long experience in the software industry has long had the idea of the ‘source-control wet-work’,  where one hires a malicious hacker in some wild eastern country to hack into one’s own  source control system to destroy all trace of the source to an application. Alas, backup systems are just too good to make this any more than a pipedream. Somehow, it would be difficult to promote the idea. As an alternative, could one construct a source control system that, on doing all the code-quality metrics, would systematically destroy all trace of source code that failed the quality test? Alas, I can’t see many managers buying into the idea. In reading the full story of the near-loss of Toy Story 2, it set me thinking. It turned out that the lucky restoration of the code wasn’t the happy ending one first imagined it to be, because they eventually came to the conclusion that the plot was fundamentally flawed and it all had to be rewritten anyway.  Was this an early  case of the ‘source-control wet-job’?’ It is very hard nowadays to do a rapid U-turn in a development project because we are far too prone to cling to our existing source-code.

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  • Source-control 'wet-work'?

    - by Phil Factor
    When a design or creative work is flawed beyond remedy, it is often best to destroy it and start again. The other day, I lost the code to a long and intricate SQL batch I was working on. I’d thought it was impossible, but it happened. With all the technology around that is designed to prevent this occurring, this sort of accident has become a rare event.  If it weren’t for a deranged laptop, and my distraction, the code wouldn’t have been lost this time.  As always, I sighed, had a soothing cup of tea, and typed it all in again.  The new code I hastily tapped in  was much better: I’d held in my head the essence of how the code should work rather than the details: I now knew for certain  the start point, the end, and how it should be achieved. Instantly the detritus of half-baked thoughts fell away and I was able to write logical code that performed better.  Because I could work so quickly, I was able to hold the details of all the columns and variables in my head, and the dynamics of the flow of data. It was, in fact, easier and quicker to start from scratch rather than tidy up and refactor the existing code with its inevitable fumbling and half-baked ideas. What a shame that technology is now so good that developers rarely experience the cleansing shock of losing one’s code and having to rewrite it from scratch.  If you’ve never accidentally lost  your code, then it is worth doing it deliberately once for the experience. Creative people have, until Technology mistakenly prevented it, torn up their drafts or sketches, threw them in the bin, and started again from scratch.  Leonardo’s obsessive reworking of the Mona Lisa was renowned because it was so unusual:  Most artists have been utterly ruthless in destroying work that didn’t quite make it. Authors are particularly keen on writing afresh, and the results are generally positive. Lawrence of Arabia actually lost the entire 250,000 word manuscript of ‘The Seven Pillars of Wisdom’ by accidentally leaving it on a train at Reading station, before rewriting a much better version.  Now, any writer or artist is seduced by technology into altering or refining their work rather than casting it dramatically in the bin or setting a light to it on a bonfire, and rewriting it from the blank page.  It is easy to pick away at a flawed work, but the real creative process is far more brutal. Once, many years ago whilst running a software house that supplied commercial software to local businesses, I’d been supervising an accounting system for a farming cooperative. No packaged system met their needs, and it was all hand-cut code.  For us, it represented a breakthrough as it was for a government organisation, and success would guarantee more contracts. As you’ve probably guessed, the code got mangled in a disk crash just a week before the deadline for delivery, and the many backups all proved to be entirely corrupted by a faulty tape drive.  There were some fragments left on individual machines, but they were all of different versions.  The developers were in despair.  Strangely, I managed to re-write the bulk of a three-month project in a manic and caffeine-soaked weekend.  Sure, that elegant universally-applicable input-form routine was‘nt quite so elegant, but it didn’t really need to be as we knew what forms it needed to support.  Yes, the code lacked architectural elegance and reusability. By dawn on Monday, the application passed its integration tests. The developers rose to the occasion after I’d collapsed, and tidied up what I’d done, though they were reproachful that some of the style and elegance had gone out of the application. By the delivery date, we were able to install it. It was a smaller, faster application than the beta they’d seen and the user-interface had a new, rather Spartan, appearance that we swore was done to conform to the latest in user-interface guidelines. (we switched to Helvetica font to look more ‘Bauhaus’ ). The client was so delighted that he forgave the new bugs that had crept in. I still have the disk that crashed, up in the attic. In IT, we have had mixed experiences from complete re-writes. Lotus 123 never really recovered from a complete rewrite from assembler into C, Borland made the mistake with Arago and Quattro Pro  and Netscape’s complete rewrite of their Navigator 4 browser was a white-knuckle ride. In all cases, the decision to rewrite was a result of extreme circumstances where no other course of action seemed possible.   The rewrite didn’t come out of the blue. I prefer to remember the rewrite of Minix by young Linus Torvalds, or the rewrite of Bitkeeper by a slightly older Linus.  The rewrite of CP/M didn’t do too badly either, did it? Come to think of it, the guy who decided to rewrite the windowing system of the Xerox Star never regretted the decision. I’ll agree that one should often resist calls for a rewrite. One of the worst habits of the more inexperienced programmer is to denigrate whatever code he or she inherits, and then call loudly for a complete rewrite. They are buoyed up by the mistaken belief that they can do better. This, however, is a different psychological phenomenon, more related to the idea of some motorcyclists that they are operating on infinite lives, or the occasional squaddies that if they charge the machine-guns determinedly enough all will be well. Grim experience brings out the humility in any experienced programmer.  I’m referring to quite different circumstances here. Where a team knows the requirements perfectly, are of one mind on methodology and coding standards, and they already have a solution, then what is wrong with considering  a complete rewrite? Rewrites are so painful in the early stages, until that point where one realises the payoff, that even I quail at the thought. One needs a natural disaster to push one over the edge. The trouble is that source-control systems, and disaster recovery systems, are just too good nowadays.   If I were to lose this draft of this very blog post, I know I’d rewrite it much better. However, if you read this, you’ll know I didn’t have the nerve to delete it and start again.  There was a time that one prayed that unreliable hardware would deliver you from an unmaintainable mess of a codebase, but now technology has made us almost entirely immune to such a merciful act of God. An old friend of mine with long experience in the software industry has long had the idea of the ‘source-control wet-work’,  where one hires a malicious hacker in some wild eastern country to hack into one’s own  source control system to destroy all trace of the source to an application. Alas, backup systems are just too good to make this any more than a pipedream. Somehow, it would be difficult to promote the idea. As an alternative, could one construct a source control system that, on doing all the code-quality metrics, would systematically destroy all trace of source code that failed the quality test? Alas, I can’t see many managers buying into the idea. In reading the full story of the near-loss of Toy Story 2, it set me thinking. It turned out that the lucky restoration of the code wasn’t the happy ending one first imagined it to be, because they eventually came to the conclusion that the plot was fundamentally flawed and it all had to be rewritten anyway.  Was this an early  case of the ‘source-control wet-job’?’ It is very hard nowadays to do a rapid U-turn in a development project because we are far too prone to cling to our existing source-code.

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  • DBA Best Practices - A Blog Series: Episode 1 - Backups

    - by Argenis
      This blog post is part of the DBA Best Practices series, on which various topics of concern for daily database operations are discussed. Your feedback and comments are very much welcome, so please drop by the comments section and be sure to leave your thoughts on the subject. Morning Coffee When I was a DBA, the first thing I did when I sat down at my desk at work was checking that all backups had completed successfully. It really was more of a ritual, since I had a dual system in place to check for backup completion: 1) the scheduled agent jobs to back up the databases were set to alert the NOC in failure, and 2) I had a script run from a central server every so often to check for any backup failures. Why the redundancy, you might ask. Well, for one I was once bitten by the fact that database mail doesn't work 100% of the time. Potential causes for failure include issues on the SMTP box that relays your server email, firewall problems, DNS issues, etc. And so to be sure that my backups completed fine, I needed to rely on a mechanism other than having the servers do the taking - I needed to interrogate the servers and ask each one if an issue had occurred. This is why I had a script run every so often. Some of you might have monitoring tools in place like Microsoft System Center Operations Manager (SCOM) or similar 3rd party products that would track all these things for you. But at that moment, we had no resort but to write our own Powershell scripts to do it. Now it goes without saying that if you don't have backups in place, you might as well find another career. Your most sacred job as a DBA is to protect the data from a disaster, and only properly safeguarded backups can offer you peace of mind here. "But, we have a cluster...we don't need backups" Sadly I've heard this line more than I would have liked to. You need to understand that a cluster is comprised of shared storage, and that is precisely your single point of failure. A cluster will protect you from an issue at the Operating System level, and also under an outage of any SQL-related service or dependent devices. But it will most definitely NOT protect you against corruption, nor will it protect you against somebody deleting data from a table - accidentally or otherwise. Backup, fine. How often do I take a backup? The answer to this is something you will hear frequently when working with databases: it depends. What does it depend on? For one, you need to understand how much data your business is willing to lose. This is what's called Recovery Point Objective, or RPO. If you don't know how much data your business is willing to lose, you need to have an honest and realistic conversation about data loss expectations with your customers, internal or external. From my experience, their first answer to the question "how much data loss can you withstand?" will be "zero". In that case, you will need to explain how zero data loss is very difficult and very costly to achieve, even in today's computing environments. Do you want to go ahead and take full backups of all your databases every hour, or even every day? Probably not, because of the impact that taking a full backup can have on a system. That's what differential and transaction log backups are for. Have I answered the question of how often to take a backup? No, and I did that on purpose. You need to think about how much time you have to recover from any event that requires you to restore your databases. This is what's called Recovery Time Objective. Again, if you go ask your customer how long of an outage they can withstand, at first you will get a completely unrealistic number - and that will be your starting point for discussing a solution that is cost effective. The point that I'm trying to get across is that you need to have a plan. This plan needs to be practiced, and tested. Like a football playbook, you need to rehearse the moves you'll perform when the time comes. How often is up to you, and the objective is that you feel better about yourself and the steps you need to follow when emergency strikes. A backup is nothing more than an untested restore Backups are files. Files are prone to corruption. Put those two together and realize how you feel about those backups sitting on that network drive. When was the last time you restored any of those? Restoring your backups on another box - that, by the way, doesn't have to match the specs of your production server - will give you two things: 1) peace of mind, because now you know that your backups are good and 2) a place to offload your consistency checks with DBCC CHECKDB or any of the other DBCC commands like CHECKTABLE or CHECKCATALOG. This is a great strategy for VLDBs that cannot withstand the additional load created by the consistency checks. If you choose to offload your consistency checks to another server though, be sure to run DBCC CHECKDB WITH PHYSICALONLY on the production server, and if you're using SQL Server 2008 R2 SP1 CU4 and above, be sure to enable traceflags 2562 and/or 2549, which will speed up the PHYSICALONLY checks further - you can read more about this enhancement here. Back to the "How Often" question for a second. If you have the disk, and the network latency, and the system resources to do so, why not backup the transaction log often? As in, every 5 minutes, or even less than that? There's not much downside to doing it, as you will have to clear the log with a backup sooner than later, lest you risk running out space on your tlog, or even your drive. The one drawback to this approach is that you will have more files to deal with at restore time, and processing each file will add a bit of extra time to the entire process. But it might be worth that time knowing that you minimized the amount of data lost. Again, test your plan to make sure that it matches your particular needs. Where to back up to? Network share? Locally? SAN volume? This is another topic where everybody has a favorite choice. So, I'll stick to mentioning what I like to do and what I consider to be the best practice in this regard. I like to backup to a SAN volume, i.e., a drive that actually lives in the SAN, and can be easily attached to another server in a pinch, saving you valuable time - you wouldn't need to restore files on the network (slow) or pull out drives out a dead server (been there, done that, it’s also slow!). The key is to have a copy of those backup files made quickly, and, if at all possible, to a remote target on a different datacenter - or even the cloud. There are plenty of solutions out there that can help you put such a solution together. That right there is the first step towards a practical Disaster Recovery plan. But there's much more to DR, and that's material for a different blog post in this series.

    Read the article

  • DBA Best Practices - A Blog Series: Episode 1 - Backups

    - by Argenis
      This blog post is part of the DBA Best Practices series, on which various topics of concern for daily database operations are discussed. Your feedback and comments are very much welcome, so please drop by the comments section and be sure to leave your thoughts on the subject. Morning Coffee When I was a DBA, the first thing I did when I sat down at my desk at work was checking that all backups have completed successfully. It really was more of a ritual, since I had a dual system in place to check for backup completion: 1) the scheduled agent jobs to back up the databases were set to alert the NOC in failure, and 2) I had a script run from a central server every so often to check for any backup failures. Why the redundancy, you might ask. Well, for one I was once bitten by the fact that database mail doesn't work 100% of the time. Potential causes for failure include issues on the SMTP box that relays your server email, firewall problems, DNS issues, etc. And so to be sure that my backups completed fine, I needed to rely on a mechanism other than having the servers do the taking - I needed to interrogate the servers and ask each one if an issue had occurred. This is why I had a script run every so often. Some of you might have monitoring tools in place like Microsoft System Center Operations Manager (SCOM) or similar 3rd party products that would track all these things for you. But at that moment, we had no resort but to write our own Powershell scripts to do it. Now it goes without saying that if you don't have backups in place, you might as well find another career. Your most sacred job as a DBA is to protect the data from a disaster, and only properly safeguarded backups can offer you peace of mind here. "But, we have a cluster...we don't need backups" Sadly I've heard this line more than I would have liked to. You need to understand that a cluster is comprised of shared storage, and that is precisely your single point of failure. A cluster will protect you from an issue at the Operating System level, and also under an outage of any SQL-related service or dependent devices. But it will most definitely NOT protect you against corruption, nor will it protect you against somebody deleting data from a table - accidentally or otherwise. Backup, fine. How often do I take a backup? The answer to this is something you will hear frequently when working with databases: it depends. What does it depend on? For one, you need to understand how much data your business is willing to lose. This is what's called Recovery Point Objective, or RPO. If you don't know how much data your business is willing to lose, you need to have an honest and realistic conversation about data loss expectations with your customers, internal or external. From my experience, their first answer to the question "how much data loss can you withstand?" will be "zero". In that case, you will need to explain how zero data loss is very difficult and very costly to achieve, even in today's computing environments. Do you want to go ahead and take full backups of all your databases every hour, or even every day? Probably not, because of the impact that taking a full backup can have on a system. That's what differential and transaction log backups are for. Have I answered the question of how often to take a backup? No, and I did that on purpose. You need to think about how much time you have to recover from any event that requires you to restore your databases. This is what's called Recovery Time Objective. Again, if you go ask your customer how long of an outage they can withstand, at first you will get a completely unrealistic number - and that will be your starting point for discussing a solution that is cost effective. The point that I'm trying to get across is that you need to have a plan. This plan needs to be practiced, and tested. Like a football playbook, you need to rehearse the moves you'll perform when the time comes. How often is up to you, and the objective is that you feel better about yourself and the steps you need to follow when emergency strikes. A backup is nothing more than an untested restore Backups are files. Files are prone to corruption. Put those two together and realize how you feel about those backups sitting on that network drive. When was the last time you restored any of those? Restoring your backups on another box - that, by the way, doesn't have to match the specs of your production server - will give you two things: 1) peace of mind, because now you know that your backups are good and 2) a place to offload your consistency checks with DBCC CHECKDB or any of the other DBCC commands like CHECKTABLE or CHECKCATALOG. This is a great strategy for VLDBs that cannot withstand the additional load created by the consistency checks. If you choose to offload your consistency checks to another server though, be sure to run DBCC CHECKDB WITH PHYSICALONLY on the production server, and if you're using SQL Server 2008 R2 SP1 CU4 and above, be sure to enable traceflags 2562 and/or 2549, which will speed up the PHYSICALONLY checks further - you can read more about this enhancement here. Back to the "How Often" question for a second. If you have the disk, and the network latency, and the system resources to do so, why not backup the transaction log often? As in, every 5 minutes, or even less than that? There's not much downside to doing it, as you will have to clear the log with a backup sooner than later, lest you risk running out space on your tlog, or even your drive. The one drawback to this approach is that you will have more files to deal with at restore time, and processing each file will add a bit of extra time to the entire process. But it might be worth that time knowing that you minimized the amount of data lost. Again, test your plan to make sure that it matches your particular needs. Where to back up to? Network share? Locally? SAN volume? This is another topic where everybody has a favorite choice. So, I'll stick to mentioning what I like to do and what I consider to be the best practice in this regard. I like to backup to a SAN volume, i.e., a drive that actually lives in the SAN, and can be easily attached to another server in a pinch, saving you valuable time - you wouldn't need to restore files on the network (slow) or pull out drives out a dead server (been there, done that, it’s also slow!). The key is to have a copy of those backup files made quickly, and, if at all possible, to a remote target on a different datacenter - or even the cloud. There are plenty of solutions out there that can help you put such a solution together. That right there is the first step towards a practical Disaster Recovery plan. But there's much more to DR, and that's material for a different blog post in this series.

    Read the article

  • You Might Be a DBA

    - by BuckWoody
    With all apologies to Jeff Foxworthy, I was up late Friday night on a holiday weekend (which translated into T-SQL becomes “Maintenance Window”) and I got bored in between the two or three minutes I had between clicks. So I started a “Twitter” meme – and it just took off. I haven’t cleaned these up much, but here, in author order as of Saturday the 29th of May is the list “You might be a DBA” from around the Twitterverse: buckwoody Your two main enemies are developers and SAN admins #youmightbeaDBA  buckwoody People can use Access as a cross or garlic on you #youmightbeaDBA  buckwoody You always plan an exit strategy, even when entering a McDonald's #youmightbeaDBA  buckwoody You can't explain to your family what you really do for a living #youmightbeaDBA  buckwoody You have at least one set of scripts you won't share #youmightbeaDBA  buckwoody You have an opinion on the best code-beautifier #youmightbeaDBA  buckwoody You have children older than the rest of your team #youmightbeaDBA  buckwoody You and the Oracle DBA would kill each other, but you'll happily fight off a developer together first #youmightbeaDBA  buckwoody You've threatened to quit if they give anyone the sa password on production #youmightbeaDBA  buckwoody You've sent a vendor suggestions on improving their database design or code (and been ignored) #youmightbeaDBA  buckwoody You've sent a vendor suggestions on improving their database design or code (and been ignored) #youmightbeaDBA  buckwoody You have an opinion on the best code-beautifier #youmightbeaDBA  buckwoody You have at least one set of scripts you won't share #youmightbeaDBA  buckwoody You refer to co-workers as "carbon-units" #youmightbeaDBA  buckwoody Being paranoid is on your resume at the top #youmightbeaDBA  buckwoody Everyone comes to your cube to find the MSDN DVD's #youmightbeaDBA  buckwoody You always plan an exit strategy, even when entering a McDonald's #youmightbeaDBA  buckwoody You've worn down developers to get your way by explaining normalization levels #youmightbeaDBA  buckwoody You refer to clothes as "Data Abstractions" #youmightbeaDBA  buckwoody Users pester you to be able to put data in a database, then they pester you to take it out and put it in Excel #youmightbeaDBA  buckwoody Others try to de-duplicate data, you try to copy it to more than three locations #youmightbeaDBA  buckwoody You have at least one DLT tape in the trunk of your car #youmightbeaDBA  buckwoody You use twitter and facebook to talk with colleagues because there's no one else in your company that does what you do #youmightbeaDBA  buckwoody Your spouse knows what "ETL" means #youmightbeaDBA  buckwoody You've referred to yourself as the "Data Janitor" #youmightbeaDBA  buckwoody You don't have positive connotations of the word "upgrade" #youmightbeaDBA  buckwoody You get your coffee before you check your servers, because you know you won't get any if you don't #youmightbeaDBA  buckwoody You always come to work through the back door so no one hijacks you on the way to your cube #youmightbeaDBA  buckwoody You check your server logs before you check your e-mail in the morning so you can reply "Yeah, I already fixed that." #youmightbeaDBA  buckwoody You have more conference badges than clean socks #youmightbeaDBA  buckwoody Your coffee mug says "It depends" #youmightbeaDBA  buckwoody You can convince a boss that you need 16GB of RAM in your laptop #youmightbeaDBA  buckwoody You've used ebay to find production equipment #youmightbeaDBA  buckwoody You pad all project timelines by 2X, and you still miss them #youmightbeaDBA  buckwoody You know when your company is acquiring another even before the CFO #youmightbeaDBA  buckwoody You pad all project timelines by 2X, and you still miss them #youmightbeaDBA  buckwoody You call aspirin "work vitamins" #youmightbeaDBA  buckwoody You get the same amount of sleep even after you have a child #youmightbeaDBA  buckwoody You obsess about performance metrics from over one year ago #youmightbeaDBA  buckwoody The first thing you buy after the database software is aftermarket tools to manage the database software #youmightbeaDBA  buckwoody You've tried to convince someone else to become a DBA #youmightbeaDBA  buckwoody You use twitter and facebook to talk with colleagues because there's no one else in your company that does what you do #youmightbeaDBA  buckwoody You only know other DBA's by their Tweet Handle #youmightbeaDBA  buckwoody You've explained the difference between 32 and 64-bit to more than one manager in terms they can understand, using puppets #youmightbeaDBA  buckwoody Your two main enemies are developers and SAN admins #youmightbeaDBA  buckwoody You've driven to the Datacenter to install SQL Server because "you don't trust those NOC admins" #youmightbeaDBA  buckwoody You pay more for faster Internet connections than cable at home so you don't have to drive in #youmightbeaDBA  buckwoody You call texting a "queuing system" #youmightbeaDBA  buckwoody You know that if someone can read Perl, they manage an Oracle system #youmightbeaDBA  buckwoody You have an e-mail rule for backup notifications #youmightbeaDBA  buckwoody Your food pyramid includes coffee, salt and fat #youmightbeaDBA  buckwoody You wish everything had a graphical query plan #youmightbeaDBA  buckwoody You refactor your e-mails #youmightbeaDBA  buckwoody You've gotten more help from twitter and facebook than all your years in college #youmightbeaDBA  buckwoody You would pay money for a license plate that has the letters S-Q-L together #youmightbeaDBA  buckwoody You have actually considered making a RAID array from thumb drives #youmightbeaDBA  buckwoody Everything on your laptop is installed from your MSDN subscription #youmightbeaDBA  buckwoody You've written blog posts on technology you've never actually implemented in production #youmightbeaDBA  buckwoody Everything on your laptop is installed from your MSDN subscription #youmightbeaDBA  buckwoody @MidnightDBA Click the #youmightbeaDBA tag. I've had WAY too much coffee today.  buckwoody There is no other position that is 1-deep except you and the CEO #youmightbeaDBA  buckwoody When you watch "The Office" you call it "OJT" #youmightbeaDBA  buckwoody You would pay money for a license plate that has the letters S-Q-L together #youmightbeaDBA  buckwoody Your blog would make a "best practices" or "worst practices" book #youmightbeaDBA  buckwoody You have actually considered making a RAID array from thumb drives #youmightbeaDBA  buckwoody The first thing you install on your netbook is SSMS #youmightbeaDBA  buckwoody Everything on your laptop is installed from your MSDN subscription #youmightbeaDBA  buckwoody Your watch is set to UTC because it's just easier #youmightbeaDBA  buckwoody You make plenty of money, but you're excited to get a $2.00 squeeze-ball from Quest and Redgate #youmightbeaDBA  buckwoody You make plenty of money, but you're excited to get a $2.00 squeeze-ball from Quest and Redgate #youmightbeaDBA  buckwoody You think data can be represented as something OTHER than XML #youmightbeaDBA  buckwoody You tell people that you made a database query go faster, and expect them to be happy for you #youmightbeaDBA  buckwoody You take the word "NoSQL" as a personal attack #youmightbeaDBA  buckwoody People can use Access as a cross or garlic on you #youmightbeaDBA  buckwoody * == bad #youmightbeaDBA  buckwoody * == bad #youmightbeaDBA  buckwoody There are just as many females in your technical field as males #youmightbeaDBA  buckwoody People can use Access as a cross or garlic on you #youmightbeaDBA  buckwoody You've gotten more help from twitter and facebook than all your years in college #youmightbeaDBA  buckwoody You think that something OTHER than the database might be the performance bottleneck #youmightbeaDBA  buckwoody You refer to time as a "Clustered Index" #youmightbeaDBA  buckwoody You know why "user" refers to both business people and crack addicts #youmightbeaDBA  buckwoody You make plenty of money, but you're excited to get a $2.00 squeeze-ball from Quest and Redgate #youmightbeaDBA  buckwoody You can't explain to your family what you really do for a living #youmightbeaDBA  buckwoody You tell people that you made a database query go faster, and expect them to be happy for you #youmightbeaDBA  buckwoody You think a millisecond is a really long time #youmightbeaDBA  buckwoody You're sitting and typing #youmightbeaDBA when you could be outside #youmightbeaDBA  buckwoody You can't wait for a technical conference so you can wear a kilt - and you're not Scottish #youmightbeaDBA  buckwoody You know that "DBA" stands for "Default Blame Acceptor" #youmightbeaDBA  buckwoody People can use Access as a cross or garlic on you #youmightbeaDBA  buckwoody You know what "the truth, thole truth and nothing but the truth, so help me Codd" means #youmightbeaDBA  buckwoody You've gotten more help from twitter and facebook than all your years in college #youmightbeaDBA  buckwoody You can't talk fast enough to get a concept out of your head so you tweet it instead #youmightbeaDBA  buckwoody You cry when someone doesn't use a WHERE clause #youmightbeaDBA  buckwoody You think data can be represented as something OTHER than XML #youmightbeaDBA  buckwoody You think "Set theory" is not an verb but a noun #youmightbeaDBA  buckwoody You try to convince random strangers to vote on your Connect item #youmightbeaDBA  buckwoody You think 3 hours of contiguous sleep is a good thing #youmightbeaDBA or #youmightbeamother  buckwoody You don't like Oracle, and not just because of what she did to Neo #youmightbeaDBA  buckwoody You know when to say "sequel" and "s-q-l" #youmightbeaDBA  buckwoody You know where the data is #youmightbeaDBA  buckwoody You refer to your children as "Fully Redundant Mirrors" #youmightbeaDBA  buckwoody Holiday == "Maintenance Window" #youmightbeaDBA  buckwoody Your laptop is more powerful than the servers in most companies - including your own #youmightbeaDBA  buckwoody You capitalize SELECTed words #youmightbeaDBA  buckwoody You take the word "NoSQL" as a personal attack #youmightbeaDBA  buckwoody You know why "user" refers to both business people and crack addicts #youmightbeaDBA  buckwoody You cringe in public when the word "upgrade" is used in a sentence #youmightbeaDBA  buckwoody Holiday == "Maintenance Window" #youmightbeaDBA  buckwoody All Data Is MetaData means something to you #youmightbeaDBA  buckwoody You've never seen the driveway to your house in the daylight #youmightbeaDBA  buckwoody You think that something OTHER than the database might be the performance bottleneck #youmightbeaDBA  buckwoody Most of your bloodstream is composed of caffeine #youmightbeaDBA  buckwoody Your task list is labeled "CRUD Matrix" #youmightbeaDBA  buckwoody You call your wife/husband a "Linked Server" #youmightbeaDBA  anonythemouse When someone tells you they are going to take a dump and you wonder of which database then #youmightbeaDBA  anonythemouse When it's 11pm on a holiday weekend and you are working #youmightbeaDBA  anonythemouse When you sit down at a table and look for it's primary key #youmightbeaDBA  anonythemouse When getting milk from the fridge you check the expiry date is > getdate() #youmightbeaDBA  blakmk when you wake up dreaming about sql #youmightbeaDBA  CharlesGarver You think a @buckwoody bobblehead would be a cool thing to have on the dashboard of your car #youmightbeaDBA  CharlesGarver Your friends don't understand why you think there's a difference between single and double quotes #youmightbeaDBA  CharlesGarver Even the newest employees know your name from all the downtime notices you've sent out #youmightbeaDBA  CharlesGarver You sometimes feel anxious and think "I should test restoring those backups" and then the feeling passes #youmightbeadba  CharlesGarver You know what a co-worker means when they ask "how is your squirrel server?" #youmightbeadba  CharlesGarver You can't sleep at night and you ponder the logisitcs of collecting every copy of Access for the world's biggest bonfire #youmightbeaDBA  CharlesGarver You can't sleep at night and you ponder the logisitcs of collecting every copy of Access for the world's biggest bonfire #youmightbeaDBA  CharlesGarver You're willing to move someone's job up in priority for a box of #voodoodonuts #youmightbeaDBA  CharlesGarver Each person in your company seems to think you work for THEM #youmightbeaDBA  CharlesGarver You have a Love/Hate relationship going on with #Microsoft #youmightbeaDBA  CharlesGarver People ask you to troubleshoot their Access program #youmightbeaDBA  CharlesGarver The first words you hear in the morning are 'your voicemail box is full' #youmightbeaDBA  CharlesGarver The thought of disrupting 500 people's work so you can do something doesn't phase you #youmightbeaDBA  CharlesGarver You can't sleep at night and you ponder the logisitcs of collecting every copy of Access for the world's biggest bonfire #youmightbeaDBA  CharlesGarver Your home computer is backed up in 3 different places #youmightbeaDBA  CharlesGarver Your wardrobe for work includes pajamas #youmightbeaDBA  CharlesGarver Someone tells you to look in the INDEX and you look puzzled before finally going to the back of the book. #youmightbeaDBA  chuckboycejr If you have ever set up a SQLAgent job to email your mobile phone to serve as an alarm clock #youmightbeaDBA  chuckboycejr If you'd rather meet Itzik than Jay Z #youmightbeaDBA  chuckboycejr If you'd rather meet Itzik than Jay Z #youmightbeaDBA  chuckboycejr If you'd wrestle a SysAdmin to the ground to implement #DPA best practices as per @aspiringgeek #youmightbeaDBA  databaseguy I need to be up in 7 hours, so I'm off to bed! I'll have to read the rest of @buckwoody's #youmightbeaDBA posts in the AM. (g'night Buck!)  databaseguy When people ask you about your house, the first thing you describe is the network. #youmightbeaDBA  databaseguy The last thing you say at the office each day is, "is anybody else here? I'm shutting off the lights!" #youmightbeaDBA  databaseguy Your blood pressure rises when you read application specs drafted by marketing. #youmightbeaDBA  databaseguy A good day at work is one when nobody pays you no mind. #youmightbeaDBA  databaseguy You care about latches and wait states. #youmightbeaDBA  databaseguy You have worked over 200 hours on a performance tuning project that required no application changes at all. #youmightbeaDBA  databaseguy The late-night security guard knows the names of your spouse and kids. #youmightbeaDBA  databaseguy You have had vigorous debates about whether it should be pronounced "sequel" or "ess-queue-ell". #youmightbeaDBA  databaseguy You have VPN and RDP software installed on your phone ... just in case. #youmightbeaDBA  databaseguy You have edited a data file by hand, just to see what would happen. #youmightbeaDBA  databaseguy You decorate your office walls with database catalog posters. #youmightbeaDBA  databaseguy You've built programs that access data just to keep other developers from asking you to run queries all the time. #youmightbeaDBA  databaseguy When you watch movies like The Matrix, you find yourself calculating the fasibility of storing all that data. #youmightbeaDBA  databaseguy You have tried to convince someone to spend money on an SSD storage array. #youmightbeaDBA  databaseguy When CPU is spiked on a server, you want to gather forensic evidence. #youmightbeaDBA  databaseguy You have to remind developers not to push code to production without checking if the database is ready. #youmightbeaDBA  databaseguy Nobody cares what you wear to work, as long as the thing keeps running. #youmightbeaDBA  databaseguy Telepathy is a job requirement when working with app dev teams. #youmightbeaDBA  databaseguy You read database statistics for the educational value. #youmightbeaDBA  databaseguy And your boss freely admits this to anyone within earshot. #youmightbeaDBA  databaseguy Your boss cannot explain or understand what you do. #youmightbeaDBA  databaseguy You envision ERDs when you see a GUI. #youmightbeaDBA  databaseguy You say things like "applications come and go, but data lasts forever." #youmightbeaDBA  databaseguy You have memorized the names of several of the AdventureWorks employees. #youmightbeaDBA  databaseguy You know what MAXDOP setting you can get away with for a big query based on current server load. #youmightbeaDBA  databaseguy And you immediately recognize the recursion in my last tweet. #youmightbeaDBA  databaseguy You find 50 simultaneous tweets from @buckwoody about #youmightbeaDBA :O)  DBAishness You have "funny stories" about the times your developers accidentally deleted the T-log in their test environment. #youmightbeaDBA  DBAishness Planning to slice and dice your MDW data with PowerPivot makes you giggle like a schoolgirl. #youmightbeaDBA  donalddotfarmer You think @buckwoody lives in the "real world." #youmightbeaDBA  jamach09 @buckwoody #youmightbeaDBA Why go outside when you can sit in the nice cool server room?  jamach09 If you refer to procreation as "Replication", #youmightbeaDBA.  jamach09 If you think ORM is a four-letter word, #youmightbeaDBA  JamesMarsh If you have ever preached the value of Source Code Control, #YouMightBeADBA  jethrocarr @venzann You store your shopping list in a ACID compliant DB #youmightbeaDBA  joe_positive @buckwoody thought it stood for "Don't Bother Asking" #youmightbeaDBA  joe_positive when you check your IT Events Calendar before making weekend plans #youmightbeaDBA  LadyRuna You cringe whenever someone calls Excel a database #youmightbeaDBA  LadyRuna When the waiter says he'll be your server today, you ask how many terabytes he is #youmightbeaDBA  LadyRuna you always call the asterisk a "Star" #youmightbeaDBA  LadyRuna You walk into a server room, say "Nice RACK!" and everyone there knows you're talking about server rack... #youmightbeaDBA  LadyRuna You receive more messages from servers than from friends #youmightbeaDBA  LadyRuna hmmm... #youmightbeaDBA if your recipe for gumbo is "SELECT * FROM Refrigerator"  markjholmes @SQLSoldier Heh. #youmightbeaDBA if you correct other DBAs' spelling of @PaulRandal  markjholmes #youmightbeaDBA if you actually test RAID5 vs RAID10 on your SAN because when it comes to configuration, "it depends."  markjholmes #youmightbeaDBA if you have at least 3 definitions of the word "cluster"  MarlonRibunal 3 Words: @BrentO, snicker, & Access #youmightbeaDBA  MarlonRibunal @onpnt @mikeSQL my appeal was a couple of mins late. Enjoying #youmightbeaDBA  MarlonRibunal @mikeSQL @onpnt pls, don't mention bacon #youmightbeaDBA  merv @buckwoody You HATE 3-way joins #youmightbeaDBA  MidnightDBA If you're up at midnight Tweeting about SQL #youmightbeaDBA  MidnightDBA @buckwoody I'd noticed that. :) #youmightbeaDBA  mikeSQL when people talk about "their type" you're thinking varchar, bigint, binary, etc #youmightbeadba  mikeSQL people ask you to go to lunch , but you can't go because you're attending #SQLlunch #youmightbeadba  mikeSQL you laugh for hours at all of the #sqlmoviequotes ....things in which a normal individual would scratch their head at. #youmightbeadba  mikeSQL you laugh for hours at all of the #sqlmoviequotes ....things in which a normal individual would scratch their head at. #youmightbeadba  mrdenny If you think that @buckwoody's demo using PowerPivot to analyze index usage data from DMVs is awesome then #youmightbeaDBA  mrdenny You wish @PaulRandal still worked at Microsoft so that they would make a bobble head of him #youmightbeadba  mrdenny When it's 11pm on a holiday weekend, and your posting stupid jokes on Twitter then #youmightbeadba  mrdenny If you go out with friends and wonder why no one's wearing a kilt then #YouMightBeADBA  mrdenny You can't do basic math, but you know off the top of your head how many CALs $14,412 can buy you. #YoumightbeaDBA  mrdenny If you've ever setup a SQL Job to email you to get you out of a regularly scheduled meeting #YouMightBeADBA.  mrdenny You throw up in your mouth a little when ever you here the word "Access". Even if it doesn't relate to a MS product. #YouMightBeADBA  msdtjones You spend more time listening to @buckwoody than your wife #youmightbeaDBA  NFDotCom You perform "hail deltas" on a regular basis. #YouMightBeADBA  NoelMcKinney If you tell your wife you want to go to Columbus Ohio for your wedding anniversary so you can attend #sqlsat42 then #youmightbeaDBA  NoelMcKinney You read a union is on strike and wonder if it's a UNION ALL #youmightbeaDBA  NoelMcKinney You read a union is on strike and wonder if it's a UNION ALL #youmightbeaDBA  NoelMcKinney Someone asks you to throw another log on the fire and you tell them not to worry about it because Autogrowth is turned on #youmightbeaDBA  Nuurdygirl Even if you have a girlfriend...its possible #youmightbeadba. Yeah-i said its possible!  Nuurdygirl When your girlfriend has to lean around the laptop to kiss you goodnight #youmightbeadba  Old_Man_Fish If you worry about how big your package is and how long it takes to finish #youmightbeaDBA  Old_Man_Fish If you no longer wonder if someone is in trouble or died if you are getting calls at 2AM #youmightbeaDBA  Old_Man_Fish If, when you hear the word ACCESS with no connotation you blood pressure jumps 50 points, #youmightbeaDBA  onpnt When you hear the word inject you immediately get concerned if your databases are OK #youmightbeaDBA  onpnt Your servers haven't been rebooted in a year #youmightbeaDBA  onpnt You know why it's funny when @PaulRandal has the word, "Sheep" in a tweet #youmightbeaDBA  onpnt You have read BOL without actually having a problem to figure out #youmightbeaDBA  onpnt You can type "SELECT columns FROM tables" without typos but tipen ni Banglish ares a messis #youmightbeaDBA  onpnt DR strategies doesn't include the word, RAID in them #youmightbeaDBA  onpnt you can move a SQL Server instance to a new server without the users ever knowing #youmightbeaDBA  onpnt You have made an SSIS package that is more than one step #youmightbeaDBA  onpnt You have the balls to say no to your boss when they ask for the sa password #youmightbeaDBA  onpnt you google to trouble shoot a problem and end up at your own blog (and it fixes it) #youmightbeaDBA  onpnt You talk your wife into moving the family vacation a week earlier so you can attend the areas local SSUG meeting #youmightbeaDBA  onpnt you can explain to a nontechnical person what a deadlock is #youmightbeaDBA  onpnt You hope a girl asks you what your collation is #youmightbeaDBA  onpnt you make jokes that include the words shrink, truncate and 1205. And you are the only one that laughs at them #youmightbeaDBA  onpnt You rate your ability to stay awake to work longer on blogs, twitter, forums and your day to day job with the 5 9's goal #youmightbeaDBA  onpnt you have major surgery and beg the doctor to release you back to work 5 days later because you miss your servers #youmightbeaDBA #TrueStory  onpnt You do have backups and you know how to use them #youmightbeaDBA  onpnt It's the network #youmightbeaDBA  onpnt When the developers get to work your mood changes rapidly #youmightbeaDBA  onpnt When someone says, "PASS", you first think of karaoke #youmightbeaDBA  onpnt Recruiters try to get you to call them *just* because they think you'll give them @BrentO contact info #youmightbeaDBA  onpnt You chuckle every time you go to grab the "CLR" Calcium, Lime and Rust Remover to clean something #youmightbeaDBA  onpnt @MarlonRibunal @mikeSQL Sorry man, it was already in motion ;-) #youmightbeaDBA  onpnt When you have an "I love bacon" sticker on your laptop. #youmightbeaDBA http://twitpic.com/1ry671  onpnt You sing SELECT statements in the shower #youmightbeaDBA  onpnt When you see a chicken it doesn't remind you of food. It reminds you of a guy named Jorge #youmightbeaDBA  onpnt At time, SQL is your mistress #youmightbeaDBA  onpnt Your wife wonders if SQL is the code name of your mistress at times #youmightbeaDBA  onpnt it's Friday and you are on twitter thinking really hard about what would be funny for hash tag #youmightbeaDBA  onpnt You organize your wife's "decorative"pillows on the bed in a B-Tree structure #youmightbeaDBA  PaulWhiteNZ If you: SELECT TOP (1) milk FROM fridge WHERE use_by_date >= GET_DATE() ORDER BY use_by_date ASC #YouMightBeaDBA  RonDBA #youmightbeaDBA if you read @buckwoody's and @BrentO's blogs.  ryaneastabrook @buckwoody omg, you have to stand up a website with these on them, they are awesome #youmightbeaDBA  soulvy @StrateSQL @LadyRuna Or a "Splat" #youmightbeaDBA  speedracer You can still fall asleep after three cups of coffee #youmightbeaDBA  speedracer You retweet @buckwoody on a Friday night #youmightbeaDBA  speedracer You can still fall asleep after three cups of coffee #youmightbeaDBA  speedracer Developers make you twitch #youmightbeaDBA  sqlagentman You know what X/1024*8 is. #YouMightBeADBA  SqlAsylum Your still in the office at 5:00 on memorial day weekend. #youmightbeadba :)  SQLBob Whenever someone you know gets pregnant you bring up INNER JOINs or SQL Injection attacks... #youmightbeaDBA  SQLChicken You know one or more SQL folks in the community with an animal in their username #youmightbeaDBA  SQLChicken You've used one or more car analogies to explain how a database works #youmightbeaDBA  SQLChicken “@sqljoe: #youmightbeaDBA if you applied to attend #sqlu and requested @SQLChicken to pull strings for you” lmao nice!  SQLChicken When talking about SSIS your discussions break down into various jokes about packages #youmightbeaDBA  SQLChicken Just SEEING the code for cursors makes you break out in hives #youmightbeaDBA  SQLChicken Just SEEING the code for cursors makes you break out in hives #youmightbeaDBA  SQLCraftsman You coined the phrase "Magic SAN Dust" because calling a vendor's marketing claims BS is not acceptable in a meeting. #YouMightBeADBA  SQLCraftsman If you hear about a new feature with the acronym "DAC" and wonder what disaster of a feature it is attached to this time. #YouMightBeADBA  SQLCraftsman You really own a "Stick of Much Developer Whacking" #YouMightBeADBA  SQLCraftsman You coined the phrase "Magic SAN Dust" because calling a vendor's marketing claims BS is not acceptable in a meeting. #YouMightBeADBA  SQLCraftsman Default Blame Acceptor #YouMightBeADBA  SQLCraftsman If you hear about a new feature with the acronym "DAC" and wonder what disaster of a feature it is attached to this time. #YouMightBeADBA  SQLCraftsman Default Blame Acceptor #YouMightBeADBA  SQLCraftsman If you hear about a new feature with the acronym "DAC" and wonder what disaster of a feature it is attached to this time. #YouMightBeADBA  sqljoe #youmightbeaDBA if you wished your wife knew T-sql. USE ShoppingList SELECT NecessaryItems from Supermarket WHERE Category<> ("junk food")  sqljoe #youmightbeaDBA if the first thing you kiss when you wake up is your mobile for not waking you up in the middle of the night  sqljoe #youmightbeaDBA if your wife has a "Do Not Fly" family vacation list of her own including your laptop and mobile  sqljoe #youmightbeaDBA if you have researched for DBA Anonymous groups and attended a #SSUG willing to drop your database (vice)  sqljoe #youmightbeaDBA if your only maintenance windows are staff meetings  sqljoe #youmightbeaDBA if you think of yourself as "The One" in The Matrix "balancing the equation" from The Architect's (developers) poor coding  sqljoe #youmightbeaDBA if you think @PaulRandal should have played the Oracle in The Matrix  sqljoe #youmightbeaDBA if home CD & Movie collection is stored in secured containers,in logical order & naming convention,and with a backup copy  sqljoe #youmightbeaDBA if you applied to attend #sqlu and requested @SQLChicken to pull strings for you  sqljoe #youmightbeaDBA if you have tried to TiVo @MidnightDBA broadcasts  sqljoe #youmightbeaDBA if your #sql user group feels like #AA meetings  sqljoe #youmightbeaDBA if you thought of bringing your #sql books to #sqlsaturday and #sqlpass for autographs  sqljoe #youmightbeaDBA if #sqlpass feels like the #oscars  sqljoe #youmightbeaDBA if you are proud of your small package  SQLLawman #youmightbeaDBA when you hear MDX and Acura is not first thought that comes to mind.  sqlrunner If your wife double checks that there isn't a SQLSat within 200 miles of your vacation destination #youmightbeaDBA  sqlrunner When you're on a conference call and your wife thinks your speaking in a foreign language #youmightbeaDBA  sqlrunner When you're on a conference call and your wife thinks your speaking in a foreign language #youmightbeaDBA  sqlrunner You treat the word 'access' as a verb, not a noun #youmightbeaDBA  sqlrunner If you are happy with sub-second performance #youmightbeaDBA  sqlrunner When you know the names of the NOC people AND their families #youmightbeadba  sqlrunner When you know the names of the NOC people AND their families #youmightbeadba  sqlrunner Your company set's up international phone coverage for your cruise #youmightbeaDBA  sqlsamson @buckwoody if your manager asks you for data and you respond with "there's a script for that" #youmightbeadba  sqlsamson @buckwoody If you receive more messages from your server then your spouse #youmightbeadba  SQLSoldier You've spent all night Valentines Day upgrading the SQL Servers and forgot to tell your wife you'd be working late. #youmightbeadba  SQLSoldier You're flattered when someone calls you a geek. #youmightbeadba  SQLSoldier @llangit @mrdenny it's 11pm on a holiday weekend, & your reading stupid jokes on Twitter then #youmightbeadba  SQLSoldier Your manager borrows lunch money from you because your salary is 30% higher than his. #youmightbeaDBA  SQLSoldier You think "intellisense" is a double negative because it's not intelligent nor makes sense. #youmightbeaDBA  SQLSoldier 75% of the emails you receive at home have the phrase "now following you on Twitter!" in the subject line. #youmightbeaDBA  SQLSoldier You petition Ken Burns to remake Office Space because it should have been 18 hours long. #youmightbeaDBA  SQLSoldier You select a candidate for a Jr DBA position because his resume said he's willing to get your coffee. #youmightbeaDBA  SQLSoldier Somebody misquotes @PaulRandall and you call him on your cell to verify. #youmightbeaDBA  SQLSoldier You wish the elevator in your building was slower because it's the last time you'll be left alone all day. #youmightbeaDBA  SQLSoldier The developers sacrifice small animals before giving you their code for review. #youmightbeaDBA  SQLSoldier Developers bring you coffee and a BLT when you review their code. #youmightbeaDBA #IWish  SQLSoldier You can get out of any family get-together by saying you have to work and nobody questions it. #youmightbeaDBA  SQLSoldier You've requested a HP Superdome for you "test" box. #youmightbeaDBA  SQLSoldier Your leave work early because your internet connection to the data center is better at home #youmightbeaDBA  SQLSoldier The new CEO asks you to justify your salary, so you go on vacation for 2 weeks. And he never questions you again. #youmightbeaDBA  SQLSoldier You cheer when Milton burns down the company in Office Space #youmightbeaDBA  SQLSoldier A dev. asks if you've heard about some great new feature in SQL and you show the 16 blog posts you wrote on it ... last year #youmightbeaDBA  SQLSoldier Your dev team is still testing SQL 2008 and you're already planning for SQL 11. #youmightbeaDBA #TrueStory  SQLSoldier The new CEO asks you to justify your salary, so you go on vacation for 2 weeks. And he never questions you again. #youmightbeaDBA  SQLSoldier Your dev team is still testing SQL 2008 and you're already planning for SQL 11. #youmightbeaDBA  SQLSoldier You use a cell phone service coverage map to plan your next vacation. #youmightbeaDBA  SQLSoldier You come in to work at 7 AM because it gives you at least 3 hours without any developers around. #youmightbeaDBA  SQLSoldier You figure out a way to make take your wife on a cruise and deduct it as a business expense. #youmightbeaDBA #sqlcruise  SQLSoldier You name your cat SQLDog because the name @SQLCat was already taken. #youmightbeaDBA  SQLSoldier You rate your blog posts based on the number of retweets you get. #youmightbeaDBA  SQLSoldier You disable random logins just to mess with people. #youmightbeaDBA  SQLSoldier You fall for the pickup line, "Hey baby, what's your collation?" #youmightbeaDBA  SQLSoldier You can blame an outage on anyone in the company because you're the only one that knows how to find out what really happened #youmightbeaDBA  SQLSoldier You can blame an outage on anyone in the company because you're the only one that knows how to find out what really happened #youmightbeaDBA  SQLSoldier You cheer when Milton burns down the company in Office Space #youmightbeaDBA  SQLSoldier Your leave work early because your internet connection to the data center is better at home #youmightbeaDBA  SQLSoldier You cheer when Milton burns down the company in Office Space #youmightbeaDBA  SQLSoldier Your think the 4 food groups are coffee, bacon, fast food, and Mountain Dew. #youmightbeaDBA  SQLSoldier You tell someone your job title and they ask "What?" You describe it and they ask "What?". So you say "computer geek". #youmightbeaDBA  SQLSoldier The #1 referrer to your blog is Twitter.com. #youmightbeaDBA  SQLSoldier Your idea of a good time on a Saturday involves free training. #youmightbeaDBA #sqlsat43  SQLSoldier You write a book that all of your co-workers have and none have read it. #youmightbeaDBA  SQLSoldier You write a book that sells a couple thousand copies and is heralded a best seller. #youmightbeaDBA  SQLSoldier No matter how sick you are, you go to work if it's time to pass the pager on to the next guy. #youmightbeaDBA #TrueStory  SQLSoldier You go out on the town, and strangers walk up to you and say, "Hey you're that SQL guy" #youmightbeaDBA #TrueStory  SQLSoldier Your wife asks you to fix something, and you request a downtime window. #youmightbeaDBA  SQLSoldier Your wife asks when you'll be home, and you tell her that you wish you knew. #youmightbeaDBA  SQLSoldier Your best pickup line, "Hey baby, what's your collation?" #youmightbeaDBA  SQLSoldier Your wife asks when you'll be home, and you tell her that you wish you knew. #youmightbeaDBA  SQLSoldier You know that @BuckWoody is not someone's porno name. #youmightbeaDBA  SQLSoldier You list TSQL as your native language on the 2010 census. #youmightbeaDBA  SQLSoldier Starbucks' stock price drops every time you go on vacation. #youmightbeaDBA  SQLSoldier You're happy when the web master says that the website is down. #youmightbeaDBA  SQLSoldier You know that @BuckWoody is not someone's porno name. #youmightbeaDBA  SQLSoldier You get mad when someone calls your car a "heap" because you've always considered it to be a "clustered index". #youmightbeaDBA  SQLSoldier Your blog has more hits than your company's website. #youmightbeaDBA  SQLSoldier You systematically remove the asterisk key from all keyboards in the company except yours. #youmightbeaDBA  SQLSoldier When asked if you recycle, you reply that you run sp_cycle_errorlog every night at midnight #youmightbeaDBA  SQLSoldier You wouldn't allow someone named @AdamMachanic to work on your car. #youmightbeaDBA  SQLSoldier You switch offices every 3 days to avoid developers #youmightbeaDBA  SQLSoldier PSS has your number on speed dial. #youmightbeaDBA  SQLSoldier You frown when you they tell Neo that he's going to the Oracle #youmightbeaDBA  swhaley you regretted saying "This shouldn't effect production" #youmightbeaDBA  swhaley you regretted saying "This shouldn't effect production" #youmightbeaDBA  Tarwn A pleasurable saturday means spending the day learning more about what you already do the rest of the week #youmightbeaDBA ...oh, wait...  thelostforum For great justice; all our base are belong to YOU !! #youmightbeadba  thelostforum @SQLSoldier: You need a witness to use a mirror #youmightbeaDBA ;)  TimCost you capitalize key words. always. everywhere. you can't help it, usually don't even notice. #youmightbeaDBA  Toshana Your the only one in your company not impressed with the developers new application. #youmightbeaDBA  venzann Coming soon from a (respected) book publisher - @buckwoody's #youmightbeaDBA  venzann He's on a role tonight. @buckwoody is summing up my life with his #youmightbeaDBA tweets...  venzann I love the #youmightbeaDBA tag. Found at least 6 new DBAs to follow..  venzann He's on a role tonight. @buckwoody is summing up my life with his #youmightbeaDBA tweets...  venzann You use #sqlhelp as a primary resource during troubleshooting #youmightbeaDBA  venzann You insist on stricter password security for your sql servers than you implement on your own laptop #youmightbeaDBA  WesBrownSQL @buckwoody you are up so late the only tweets you see are from @buckwoody #youmightbeaDBA  WesBrownSQL @SQLSoldier you are upgrading all your 2005 prod servers to 2008 R2 on a three day weekend... #youmightbeaDBA  zippy1981 #youmightbeaDBA if everytime you do something with #mongodb you think of the Vulcan proverb "only Nixon could go to China."  Share this post: email it! | bookmark it! | digg it! | reddit! | kick it! | live it!

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  • WinForms vs GtkSharp with Mono

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    When developing with Mono for an app to be run on Windows and Mac OSX (and maybe Linux) which would you suggest, WinForms or GtkSharp for the GUI and why? Specific examples and success/horror stories would be much appreciated.

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  • Prototype/scriptaculous browser compatibility

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    Hi, I developed a page using the latest prototype and scriptaculous versions and after cleaning it up thoroughly, the only browser where my scripts work is ... chrome! Some things don't work at all with ie7(eg BlindUp), and some validations fail with ie8 and firefox 3.5. Any success stories to contradict this ? (Any tips will be appreciated).

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  • CakePHP counterCache

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    I'm using counterCache to track the number of chapters that have been posted to their related stories. This all works fine, apart from the fact that when the chapter_count field in the database gets updated, the modified field for that record does not. Is there any way that I can set Cake to automatically update the modified field when the counterCache functionality runs? Thank you.

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  • App.Config or XAML

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    Hi ladies(?) and gents, I am currently evaluating my options for a rewrite of the projects I'm working on and I am a bit miffed by the stringly-typed nature of our app.config files. I'd like to move to a more structured approach, so I have two options: Use custom SectionHandlers in the app.config Scrap app.config and use XAML instead. I'd like to get your opinions and horror stories on this, what are the pros and cons of using XAML for this? Cheers, Florian

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  • How can I duplicate the UI functionality of Google Fastflip?

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  • php if array key exists inside multidimentional array

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    how can i check if logo exists in this array called $attachements print_r is below: Array ( [logo] = /home/richar2/public_html/ioagh/images/stories/jreviews/20100510115659_1_img.gif ) when theres no logo, the array print_r's Array ( ) i tried: if (isset($attachments['logo']) ) {..} but the conditional code runs when there is no logo

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    Our shopping website is based on drupal's ubercart. I have setup ApacheSolr and ApacheSolr Ubercart integration modules. I have created a few products on my website, but am unable to get these products indexed. The default ApacheSolr module works, i.e., I am able to index drupal's default stories. But am unable to achieve indexing for ubercart. Guidance is greatly appreciated. Even links to tutorials to set these up would be helpful.

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  • Ruby off the rails

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  • mysql - funny square characters added to the value when inserting it into table

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    Hi, I have a php script that inserts values into mySQL table INSERT INTO stories (title) VALUES('$_REQUEST[title]); I checked the values of my request variables before going into the table and it's fine. But when I add title=john to the table for example, I get something like this: title = "[][][][]john" and when I extract the value, it's a newline then john. I have my columns set to utf-8, I tried swedish character set as well. Note: I don't get this error when inserting values from the phpMyAdmin commandline

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